Hey, hey, hey…psst….we’re back…
Join Wesleying, Wesleyan’s least absorbent campus publication! So, basically, we’re the paper towels that sporadically show up on campus!!
Wesleying has been going strong for more than a decade. We were founded in 2006 by Holly and ishuku just as the internet was becoming more of a thing, and they wanted to tell everyone where the parties were, and ask the hard, irreverent questions that no one too close to the administration wanted to ask. I’m also totally stealing wilk’s article right now, because YA’LL *kind of* missed auditions (it’s the Internet’s fault; our site was down for the past couple days).
The blog has taken on a lot of different forms and styles since it was created in 2006, and that’s what keeps it interesting for me. Wesleying is a platform for literally anything that you want to write about, with one guiding principle: Wesleyan.
We’ve also been financially and ideologically and just generally independent from the institution since we were founded in 2006, and we’re planning on keeping it that way. And in order to keep going strong, we need YOU.
If you’re a Wes student and can kind of write sentences, we want you. If you feel like your voice isn’t heard on campus, we want to change that. This goes double if you’re queer, trans/nonbinary, a student of color, first gen, low income, or an international student. If you have even a fraction of enough time to have opinions about what happens on our campus, or on the Internet, or in the even-vaguely-Wes-related rest of the world, share them with us and our readers.
We will have another meeting eventually, in two weeks (Sunday, March 4th at 3PM in Boger 114). Please come if you are interested in blogging about things and putting them on this website. If you want to join but can’t make it to this meeting, please (please!) email staff[at]wesleying[dot]org with the subject line “Recruitment” and tell us about yourself and why you want to join Wesleying.
More about us after the jump:
Recruitment efforts from years past have essentially recycled the same information over and over, but here’s the gist of it:
- Wesleying is a site with 18,357 posts and has received over 7 million hits since 2006. If you write for us, literally thousands of people will read it.
- We do opinion pieces, often about pressing campus issues, sometimes ones submitted to us. We cover many of the important things that happen here, as well as the great deal of weird shit that happens here. (Who else but Wesleying will write about anal sanctity?) We liveblog campus tours (and other things, occasionally inebriated). We do write-ins and interviews. We like bad Photoshop and memes, but we also like photo galleries and longer posts. We are also in the romance business, apparently. The options are endless.
- If you’re interested in journalism, some of our writers have gone on to really prominent publications like Newsweek and The Atlantic Wire, Wired, Teen Vogue, and BuzzFeed. Just look at allthis. While The Argus exists, we think that we have more fun, xoxo.
- You can interview powerful people, occasionally get fancy press passes for cool conferences, or just know everything that’s happening on campus before anybody else.
- You can shed light on campus issues that are close to home (or not).
To run this blog, we first and foremost need writers. This can be a ready-made identity for you, or it can be something that you realize through blogging about The Notebook 2. That being said, throughout the course of the year, we can typically identify two broad categories of folks who write for Wesleying:
- A core, committed staff writer; This person attends our meetings, helps out with social media, pitches articles, and helps keep our series (e.g. THESISCRAZY) alive and well, in addition to writing more original content
- An affiliated staffer, deeply involved in a particular aspect of life at Wesleyan, that writes 1-2 features per semester; this person might be deeply involved with a segment of campus life (e.g. social activism, the WSA, STEM, athletics, film, etc.) that prevents them from being the person above. But, when there is an event, project, shift in campus dialogue, or something else that they think is relevant to their commitments, passions, identities, etc. at Wesleyan, they’ll write an article about this. If you plan to ask Wesleying to cover a topic that you have more info about than us, you might be this person!
All of what was said is in response to how we’ve been operating in the past year, but I’m still gonna quote a bunch of stuff from the past, though:
If you love Wesleying and want to help make it the weird, irreverent, and colorful media space it has become—or if you just like blogging in your underwear—please stop by. In the immortal words of The Great Sheek, “All you need is Internet access, the ability to string sentences together coherently, and an interest in life at Wesleyan as it is, was, and might be.”
As a Wesleying blogger you can be part of Wesleyan’s most frequently read media source, with the potential to shape campus discourse and the ability to keep Wespeople informed and entertained… and procrastinating. Wesleying is as good as whatever its contributors put into it, so let us know what you’ve got.
Do you know or have a lot to say about Weslife? Do you or people you know do cool stuff on/around campus? Do you want to break news as it happens? Do you take sweet campus photos? Do you like to Photoshop things? Are you into Wes music, and can you describe it in words? Are you a human filter for Internet media? Do you know your memes? Are you a news junkie with an eye for things relevant to us at Wes? Do you possess keen wit and/or discerning taste? Do you write good? Does weird/messed up shit happen to you or your friends sometimes; wanna talk about it?
Are you into digging up forgotten pieces of Wes history? Do you know secret things? Do you explore little-known, little-seen parts of campus? Is campus deconstruction second nature after you took Intro Sociology? Do you have more opinions than your friends can bear to listen to? Do u miss wen we used 2 speak LOLspeak? Do you miss yesteryear’s Wesleyan weirdness; wanna bring it back/keep it going? Do you think things just aren’t the same as they used to be? Do you want to keep up the kind of content we’ve been posting over the years? Do you have a perspective you think we’re missing, or have been neglecting lately? Are you just REALLY EXCITED TO BE HERE??
Again, if you want to join but can’t make the meeting on Sunday, email staff[at]wesleying[dot]org with your name, class year, and some things about yourself! see u soon ~